Blog

I would be pissed I didn’t get this shot earlier if I weren’t so grateful I got it at all. I haven’t been quite right since the war, posttraumatic stress and all. Nothing I did in seven years of trying to get back to normal—therapy, meds, madcap schemes—really helped. It turns out a big part of the cure was under my nose the whole time. Well, six or seven inches under my nose and a couple of inches back and to the right, in a cluster of nerves by the spinal column called the stellate ganglion. Two injections of a couple of local anesthetics—lidocaine, the same thing dentists use, and bupivacaine—into that part of the neck and I was pretty much back to my old self....
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Following the Civil War (1861–1865), Dr. Mendez DaCosta described veterans in his 1876 research paper as having “irritable heart or soldiers’ heart.” His descriptions in 1876 sounded much like the descriptions we hear today -- startle responses, hyper-vigilance, and heart arrhythmias. During the 20th Century, two world wars, other conflicts, and the ongoing war on terrorism introduced many more descriptions of symptoms like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). ...
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Suicides by active-duty troops and veterans are at levels that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Each day, on average, a current service member dies by suicide, and each hour a veteran does the same...
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A Brief video of Dr. Lipov discussing SGB at the American Psychiatric Association Meeting May 3 2014. Dr. Lipov spoke about treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by using a novel approach called Stellate Ganglion Block....
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July 5, 2013 - Post-traumatic stress disorder is a sad and perplexing condition that affects victims of violence and trauma and, notably, many of our military service veterans. On average, studies show, about 20 veterans a day commit suicide to...
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